Croc and I needed a game plan before barreling in there like reckless morons.
I mean, we were morons for not just running away, but we could try to avoid being reckless. As my dad always used to tell me growing up, if you’re going to do something stupid, try to be smart about it. I did a cursory scan of each of the five members and got a baseline level for each of ’em.
Four of the five were Archetypal Human, while their boss was a Human Variant.
Starting with the lowest-leveled member of the group, I metaphorically rolled the dice and used the Codex to pull up a rudimentary bio report on his Spatial Core.
Richard Johnson
Specimen Biotag ID #03A-01-B00R7T569C
Variant Assimilation Level: 14
Race: Human, Archetypal
__ __ __
Health: 114
Stamina Reserve: 70
Mana Pool: 24
__ __ __
Spatial Core - Active
(C) Thick Skin – Level 8
(C) Pocket Sand – Level 1
(C) Curb Stomp – Level 3
(C) Bare-Knuckle Brawler – Level 5
(C) Escalation of Force – Level 3
(C) Shoulder Check – Level 4
(U) Dumpster Dive – Level 5
(U) Razor-wire Fisticuffs – Level 6
(U) Double Bounce – Level 5
(R) ???
Affiliations of Record
Hudson’s Red Hands, Pledge; Skinless Court, Neophyte Aspirant
Although the Codex didn’t allow me to see anything else, based on his stats and the names of the individual Relics, it wasn’t hard to guess that this guy was a brawler of one variety or another. The scuffed brass knuckles hugging his fists confirmed my suspicions. The guy didn’t seem to notice that I’d scanned him at all, which meant he likely had a shitty Perception score, so I moved on to the next lowest ranking member of the party and progressively worked my way up from there.
They had another shitkicker type at level 16, while the guy with the filet knife was a level 17 who seemed to specialize in torture. He had Relics with names like Thumb Screw Grip, Sadistic Glee, Embalmer’s Anesthesia, Trip Wire, and Crude Stitch—though he had a fair number of healing Relics as well.
When I scanned the fourth member of the group, though, things went sideways. Natasha Anno was level 18, and unlike the rest of her pals, her Mana Pool was through the roof and her Relics clearly leaned toward the arcane. She had a few support buffs, but most of her spells were ranged damage dealers.
Her back stiffened as I scanned her, and her head snapped up, eyes flaring wide.
Well, shit.
“We’ve got company,” she growled softly, gaze darting around the room.
“Who’ve you got with you, Temperance?” Mohawk asked, suddenly looking nervous. “One of the Enforcers from the Howlers maybe?” He paused, a sneer curling his lips. “Or maybe some other little bitch boy, looking to curry favor with the rest of the furverts.” He wheeled around without waiting for her to reply, scanning the darkened corners of the locker room.
I instinctively scooted further back into the shadows.
“Come on out, little bitch boy, we were just playing,” he called, voice echoing off the tiled floors. “We weren’t really gonna hurt her. Just planning to put a little fear into her heart.”
He was looking the wrong way, toward the showers, which were still jettisoning thick curls of steam, but he’d turn my way before too long.
I pitched my voice low. “We need to move fast, Croc. Hit ’em while we still have the element of surprise.”
“Are you sure, Dan?” Croc whispered back. “Because this seems like a very bad idea.”
“It is a bad idea,” I agreed, “but that weirdo in the bunny suit needs our help. And sometimes doing the right thing is a bad idea, but you gotta do it anyway.”
“Are we gonna die, Dan?” Croc asked, though he sounded more determined than scared.
“Not if we’re smart,” I lied, feeling a small jab of guilt. Friends weren’t supposed to lie to each other but telling him the truth wouldn’t help anything. In a firefight, your troops needed to see confidence, not uncertainty. “But we’ll need to be decisive. That lady”—I jabbed a finger at the spellcaster, Natasha—“is bad news, so I’m gonna kill her before she can do any real damage. I’m going to make a big distraction, then we’re gonna do Croc-apult. I want you to aim for the spell slinger, understand?”
“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Croc murmured. “We haven’t tested Croc-apult yet.”
“No time like the present,” I replied. “While I’m dealing with the spellcaster, you’re going to have to handle Mohawk and his knuckle-dragging buddies for a little while. Make sure they don’t surround you. Hopefully Rabbit Ears over there will be able to help us out. If things get too bad, I want you to run—I’ll be able to find you after the dust settles.”
“I don’t see any dust, Dan,” Croc replied, sounding worried.
“Just a figure of speech,” I said. “Now get your game face on.”
Croc manifested a pair of dark eyebrows, which slanted sharply downward across the top of its googly eyes, making the dog look like an angry anime character. It was more hilarious than intimidating, but I didn’t tell the dog that. Croc was trying its best.
“I’m ready, Dan. Let’s kick some bad guy butt in the name of justice and Froyo.”
“For Froyo,” I agreed solemnly.
The dog’s form shivered, morphing into what could only be called a half-sized replica of a medieval catapult. One with a crooked mouth, googly eyes, and angry black eyebrows, of course. Still cloaked in shadow, I slipped into the bucket, said a small prayer to sweet baby Jesus above, then targeted Mohawk and unleashed a full-strength Drain-O Bolt while his back was still partially turned toward me.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“We’ve got incoming!” someone screamed, but it was too late.
The blue ball of corrosive magic roared into Mohawk with a wet slap and the sizzle of flesh as the spell immediately went to work. And because I’d cast while shrouded in the Mall Ninja’s Veil, the attack hit for three times its normal damage, dealing a total of 75 points of Corrosive Burst Damage on impact, knocking the ugly son of a bitch’s Health down by nearly half. And the additional DPS damage immediately began shredding his Health, Mana, and Stamina bars.
“Hey, dicknoodles,” I proclaimed as the Aspirants of the Court turned toward me in evident shock, “I’m Discount Dan, and you’d better keep my name out of those cock holsters you call mouths.”
They all stared at me in complete and utter disbelief. Then an enraged war cry went up and the two brawlers and Mohawk all rushed toward us with squeals of inarticulate fury.
I fired off a second round of Drain-O Bolt—burning through another 15 Mana—then activated Split Cast, peeling the single spell into two smaller blobs of corrosive death. The first hit Mohawk dead in the face, splattering across his eyes, while the second caught the bare-knuckle brawler across the lower jaw and chest. Unfortunately, the guy was wearing black football pads, covered in graffiti and metal rivets, so the blast only did a few points of damage.
I wanted to kick myself for not using Pressure Washer instead, but it was too late now.
I had 54 Mana left and I would need almost all of that for my plan to work.
“Come get some, shitheads!” I growled, making a come-at-me-bro gesture, baiting them onward as I drew my hammer from its loop with my other hand.
At the same time, I cast a glance behind the ranks of charging shitkickers and saw that Bunny Ears was now going toe-to-toe with the Hellraiser wannabe with the filet knife.
A furious green halo had erupted around her, and the baseball bat was a whirlwind in her hands. She effortlessly slapped aside a knife thrust with the bat, then pointed it at Face Tattoos and unleashed a ball of writhing black shadow. When the inky ball hit her assailant it exploded into a thousand smaller shadows. They scuttled across the man’s face, wriggled into his ears and nose, slid down his neck, then disappeared beneath his armor.
Face Tattoos shrieked bloody murder, dropped his knife, and frantically scratched at his eyes. “Spiders! You shot me in the face with a ball of spiders, you stupid bitch!”
“If you think the face is bad, just wait until they get to your asshole,” she cackled, before swinging her bat in a vicious arc, burying the nail-studded head into his thigh. He squealed like a pig and dropped to the ground, bat still lodged firmly in his leg. Temperance watched on in glee as he flailed and rolled, slapping frantically at the legion of scurrying spiders that were swarming his body.
I was as horrified as I was impressed.
Meanwhile, the spell slinger, Natasha, was in the middle of an incantation, a ball of seething red light coalescing between her palms.
“I don’t think so,” Temperance the bunny said. She thrust one hand out, her palm flat, and shouted, “Talk to the Hand!” Her voice crashed into the enemy spellcaster like a physical blow. The red ball abruptly blinked off as a thick shroud of silence enveloped her completely. Some sort of mute spell, I was guessing.
There was never going to be a better time than now.
The three brawlers were almost on top of us, ol’ Face Tattoos was slowly getting back to his feet, and the spellcaster was momentarily stunned into silence.
“Now!” I thundered at Croc.
There was a sharp twang and I felt the ground jerk beneath me, propelling me upward and forward all at once. I triggered Moving Walkway a heartbeat before my feet disconnected from the faux wooden platform and the spell propelled me through the air and toward the spell slinger like a human missile. The attack had worked so well against Harold the Terror Clown that Croc and I had been experimenting with ways to make the technique more effective.
Having the mimic launch me with its palms was inaccurate and unreliable at best. It ended with me flat on my face with a broken nose as often as it worked. But with my new Human Cannonball title, I wasn’t quite ready to call it quits.
Which is why we had invented the Croc-apult.
A Croc-powered catapult.
We’d launched dozens of Dan-weighted objects and had honed the process into an exact science over the past few days, even though we’d never tried this move in actual combat. But it worked like a dream. Mostly. I soared over the incoming goons, pointed my free hand down, and activated a single pulse of Pressure Washer, drilling directly into the top of Mohawk’s exposed head for 15 points of Slashing Damage and another 5 points of Scalding Damage.
That—combined with the trio of Drain-O Bolts he’d already absorbed—dropped him below thirty percent Health.
I sailed past the brawlers, coming so close to the ceiling that I almost brained myself on a light fixture, then descended in a perfect arc. In a cruel twist of irony, I’d actually ended up using the quadratic formula to help figure out and fine-tune the catapult trajectory. When my ninth-grade math teacher, Mr. Farris, had told me I’d use it sooner or later, I bet that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
I slammed into the spell slinger like a wrecking ball.
The landing was less than graceful, and I snapped my left index finger when it jammed into the spell slinger’s cheekbone. The break sounded like a pistol going off, but I ignored the bright lance of pain capering through my hand. At this point, a broken finger was pretty much par for the course. And, thanks to my Human Cannonball title, the fall itself did almost no damage at all.
“I’m going to make your blood boil,” the woman snarled as she rolled out from beneath me and leapt to her feet. Apparently, the furry’s suppression spell had lapsed, because the spell slinger whipped a hand forward and hurled a bright bolt of red magic directly into my face.
The agony was immediate and washed through every inch of my body all at once.
True to her word, it felt like my blood was literally boiling inside my veins. My HP dropped at an insane rate, though interestingly hers was plunging as well. I’d be long dead before that mattered, though. It was hard to see or think with the intense pain rampaging through my body like an angry Kaiju, but I knew what I needed to do. Gritting my teeth and pushing through the searing, blinding torture, I reached into my core and triggered Sterilization Field.
Blue-white light erupted outward, forming a dome with me at its center. The blood boil spell guttered and died, vanishing instantly as the light encompassed the enemy spellcaster, abruptly cutting her off from her Mana. My Health stabilized at just above forty percent, and I looked up at the woman with murder etched into the lines of my face.
Her eyes widened in terror, and she tried to quickly backpedal out of the suppression field’s area of effect. But that wasn’t happening—not if I had anything to say about it. I didn’t have an ounce of Mana to use, but I didn’t need it. I bolted forward and tackled her ass to the ground. I landed on top and quickly straddled her at the hips. In comparison to my bulky frame, she seemed painfully small and frail.
She wore leather leggings and a denim biker vest, along with a mishmash of assorted armor, ranging from shin guards and hockey pads to a medieval chainmail. A steel gorget protected her throat and a weather-beaten steampunk hat sat perched on her head, concealing short hair that had been shaven down to the scalp on one side.
Unlike all of the monsters I’d killed so far, this was a real human being. She wasn’t a horror clown or a giant slug or a gangly nightmare with a toilet for a head. This was a person. A person who had accidentally Noclipped into this living hell against her will just like me and everyone else who’d inadvertently got stuck here.
I had my hammer raised, ready to drive home the killing blow, but I hesitated.
Despite my time in the sandbox, I’d never actually killed a person before.
I’d killed plenty of person-shaped things since coming to the Backrooms, but this wasn’t the same no matter what I told myself.
I lowered my hammer.
She had no such qualms. She pulled a dagger from her boot and shanked me in the ribs, driving the blade in until it hit bone. My Health took another nasty nosedive, dropping down to thirty percent, and that’s when it clicked inside my head.
Human or not, if I didn’t kill her, she would kill me.
Period. End of story.
And though I still felt conflicted, I reminded myself that this lady had been ready to flay an innocent woman just because she might know where I was. The Backrooms changed people, and though she looked like me, the truth was that I had far more in common with Croc than I did with her. She’d traded in her humanity a long time ago, and all that remained was a husk of the woman who’d once been.
Face Tattoos was back on his feet and barreling toward me, so I slapped the Slammer of Shielding down. “Let’s Pog, motherfucker!” I thundered, conjuring a cage of golden light. He bounced off the arcane dome and landed on his ass, completely unable to help his companion.
“Nope,” I growled, raising my hammer, “this is a cage match. No getting out that easy.” Then I brought the hammer down on the side of her face.
Once.
Twice.
A third time, until there was nothing but a pulped, bloody mess.
[Level Up! x 1]
Research Achievement Unlocked!
Cold-Blooded Murderer
Congrats, big guy! Looks like you’ve finally popped your murder-cherry.
Remember, guilt is just Experience Points for the soul. Be careful, though, because it gets easier every time you do it! Murder is sort of like riding a bike in that way—except riding a bike doesn’t usually leave you with lifelong night terrors. At least, not if you’re doing it right. Anyway, sleep tight, I’m sure this pivotal moment won’t haunt you for the rest of your days!
Reward: 500 Experience Points, 1 x Gold Marauder Loot Token
Title: Cold-Blooded Murderer (E) – Earn 2 X Experience Points for Delver Deaths. Like I said, this shit gets easier and easier every time. This is an (E)volving title.
My chest constricted and my stomach clenched into a knot.
I felt sick, but now wasn’t the time to get all introspective. Now was the time to fuck shit up. I could deal with the weight of my guilt later, after we’d survived this shitshow. I gritted my teeth and yanked the dagger from my ribs, blood gushing down my side in a warm, metallic rush. I tossed the weapon aside and pulled myself off the badly disfigured corpse, wiping a few drops of blood away from my face with the back of one hand.
One down, four more ass-whoopin’s left to go.